As opposed to the incredible confusion and mess in France. Which was unbelievable: the defeat, the guys on the roads, it was incredible at that time, you can't imagine it- on the contrary, in England, everything was very organised. The guys took care of us. We were put in camps for 8 days, we were screened because they were scared that Germans would sneak in etc. And so we ended up in a camp. But it really was a nation which was fighting, which was completely preparing itself for war. And that's when the real bombings on London started. I didn't stay very long after that. I was in a camp in the south-west of London where most of the Free French were. Because it wasn't- so at the beginning there were only two of us. At the beginning we thought: we'll join the English. Then we found out that there was a guy called de Gaulle that was doing something. So one of de Gaulle's guys paid us a visit and explained the operation. And so, we joined that new formation which was to become The Free French.
You said that for once, it was a military formation, but without that humiliating aspect of military formation. That you were actually trained in what was useful, but-
But it was constituted solely of volunteers. And that, that changes everything. Between the guys who were recruited by- well not by force but who were recruited and enrolled to do their 'service militaire' and a troop solely made up of volunteers that are there to fight, it's definitely very very different.
And there were people from a variety of backgrounds and with different political opinions.
There was a mix of everything in there, absolutely everything. You had communists, royalists, absolutely everything. The majority was the usual, radical-socialist, socialist. But there was- I remember a conversation between two communists who were saying: Honestly, that general isn't being very reasonable. In the end, they enrolled like everyone else. And there were also far-right guys. It was a mix of everything.
There weren't any confrontations between these very differently opinionated people?
No. What really dominated at the time was occupied France. Especially as it was very recent, it had just happened. And it was probably the biggest catastrophe in the history of France.

François Jacob (1920-2013) was a French biochemist whose work has led to advances in the understanding of the ways in which genes are controlled. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Jacque Monod and André Lwoff, for his contribution to the field of biochemistry. His later work included studies on gene control and on embryogenesis. Besides the Nobel Prize, he also received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 1996 and was elected a member of the French Academy in 1996.

Michel Morange is a professor of Biology and Director of the Centre Cavaillès of History and Philosophy of Science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. After having obtained a Bachelor in biochemistry and two PhDs, one in Biochemistry, the other in History and Philosophy of Science, he went on to join the research unit of Molecular Genetics headed by François Jacob, in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. Together with Olivier Bensaude, he discovered that Heat Shock Proteins are specifically expressed on the onset of the mouse zygotic genome activation. Since then he has been working on the properties of Heat Shock Proteins, their role in aggregation and on the regulation of expression of these proteins during mouse embryogenesis. He is the author of 'A History of Molecular Biology' and 'The Misunderstood Gene'.